http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95836&page=1#.TwCBvzW0zNV
Court OKs Barring High IQs for Cops
New London, Conn., Sept. 8
ABC News

A man whose bid to become a police officer was rejected after he scored too high on an intelligence test has lost an appeal in his federal lawsuit against the city.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld a lower court�s decision that the city did not discriminate against Robert Jordan because the same standards were applied to everyone who took the test.

�This kind of puts an official face on discrimination in America against people of a certain class,� Jordan said today from his Waterford home. �I maintain you have no more control over your basic intelligence than your eye color or your gender or anything else.�

He said he does not plan to take any further legal action.

Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate, took the exam in 1996 and scored 33 points, the equivalent of an IQ of 125. But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.

Most Cops Just Above Normal The average score nationally for police officers is 21 to 22, the equivalent of an IQ of 104, or just a little above average.

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I don't know of research showing that a high IQ reduces performance in any kind of job.

He should have used his relatively high intelligence to figure out how to hack the test so he scored within the range of what they were looking for in intelligence.

Maybe they used high intelligence as a pretext, but really just didn't want to print the nametags reading "Officer SPAM", sensitive over porcine terms previously applied to their number. Unfortunately, I don't think pigs are a protected class either, going by the bacon on my plate this morning.

Maybe he wasn't aware that appearing too smart would bar him from consideration.

I know that I've run into more than one interview where I've been flat out told that the interviewer thought I'd find the job unchallenging. I suspect that interviewers often conduct an informal assessment of whether the person seems to be smarter than the average employee and reject candidates who seem either much more or less intelligent than the typical employee there. I've debated removing my Masters degree from my resume and modifying my speech patterns to see if that makes me appear more like the type of employee that gets hired faster, apparently.

It's an intriguing notion, that employment in a field should be limited to people within the range of the average ability within that field. It does make me wonder if this police department would hire, as a detective, a police officer of higher intelligence who had gained his or her beat experience in another city, or if their detectives are also limited to average intelligence.

At one time in Taiwan, your college entrance exam results determined not only which college you could attend (and everybody in Taiwan seemed to know and agree upon the rankings) but what your major would be. As it was explained to me, people who landed in a particular range of scores would study architecture, for example, whether or not they showed any particular aptitude for that kind of work.

Whether or not there is an official policy, I am certain that there are HG and PG folks who cannot rise through the levels of their organization because of a tacit and unconscious version of this policy. Management is usually chosen from people with cognitive abilities close enough to most of their employees that they are perceived to have "soft skills" or "interpersonal ability". And there is probably an even larger group of PG and HG folks that would not touch a management position with a 3 meter pole because they find trying to relate to people of average intelligence* all day, every day to be exhausting.

*on a level that is perceived to be meaningful

This article brought back a few bad memories growing up....we were really, really poor. My dad didn't make enough money to support us and my mom kept trying to get a job, she wouldn't get the job or would later be let go (this happened at the Post Office) because and I quote "your too smart for this position" was the most common thing she heard. She ended up going back to school and was excepted into nursing school, graduated at 42 and worked 25 years as an ER nurse..

so all turned out ok but the fact that she couldn't even get(keep) a job to help feed us when we were little because of her IQ was really disturbing

It is possible he wasn't hired as a policeman b/c he was 49 years old. Maybe too old?

The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older.

He took the test in 1996, when he was in his 30s.

I find this story to be incredibly depressing. The idea that it's okay to discriminate against someone because he's smart/got a high score on a test is obscene. Isn't that what you want?

I don't even know how the court could justify it rationale that the same standards were applied to everyone who took the test.

What if a standard for the job had been "Must be a man"? The same standard would have been applied to everyone in that case too.

The reasoning goes roughly like this:

* Highly intelligent people are not in a "protected class" under federal constitutional law
* Because of that, discrimination can occur on the basis of high intelligence as long as the government or other covered entity can articulate a "rational basis" for their decision to do so
* There is no other source of federal law that forbids discrimination against highly intelligent people in hiring

The standard is higher (and called intermediate scrutiny) for gender-based discrimination.

I have been discussing this on facebook with people from a few different fields. A couple of folks who actually hire people (a function I have successfully avoided for all the decades of my own working life) tell me that they routinely pass on candidates they feel would not be challenged by the position. One wrote, "It is true that I don't want to hire someone who is likely to jump ship after 6 months because they're too bored or are just looking for better pay. I want to hire someone who will feel challenged and satisfied with the job."

Specifically, another said that a summa cum laude graduate would be too bored to be effective in an entry level position, and was likely to leave the job soon after training was over, and that this was very expensive for the laboratory. These employers would probably never have any indication of the IQ of their candidates. They would have to infer that from the educational record, where available, or from the interview.

The court case here is not all that atypical as far as an employer declining to hire someone because they are overqualified. What it interesting about it is that the hiring policy is based on a score that is meant to represent cognitive ability (not achievement), and that the policy includes a ceiling as well as a floor.

Yes, I know...but the absurdity of discrimination that's de facto sanctioned drives me bananas --- especially because this country works so hard to ensure that the less intelligent do get "equal opportunities" (e.g. think of schools).


But IQ doesn't make you overqualified by itself. I have a high IQ but that doesn't mean I'm overqualified for driving a train (in fact, I'm underqualified).

It's amazing that our society appears to be content to say that 10,000 hours of practice are more important than ability/talent or that all children are gifted on the one hand --- yet that high IQ can preclude you from certain jobs. Which one is it? Obviously, it isn't both, so what's happening is that people want things a certain way, and reason and logic play no role in their decisions in this area.

This is why I keep my technical degrees (other than one) off my resume as well as my patents or other achievements.

HR departments see people as liabilities and not as assets. Thus they look for negatives in the person's record. Many a good firm has been ruined by this approach.

As someone who does hire, I look for the smartest person I can find with the best verbal reasoning skills.

When I was managing people, I had to make sure I was managing either smart or unsmart but very compliant people. When I got handed someone who seemed "average" to me, it always ended in disaster. I *think* they couldn't meet my expectations, but weren't used to having those troubles. The people who had disabilities often got really excited by how well things worked for them when they followed my instructions slavishly -- to the point where they started making improvements and teaching me stuff. I really kinda liked that.

Anyway; I'd say that I am constitutionally unsuited to managing, and maybe even working closely with people who are used to seeing themselves as skillful but who don't get it as easily as me. That may well apply to being a cop.

Soft-skills DO matter. And every advantage has a flip side, even if it's minor (I'm an anarchist, I don't much wanna be a cop.)

Since this is a public sector job, I hope that the defendants were able to provide statistics regarding the prevalence of high intelligence employees leaving the profession. Without that, I would probably find against them.

In the private sector, I think companies ought to be able to hire or not hire for whatever reason they like. If they are turning away great applicants for stupid reasons, let them suffer the consequences of their actions.

I had the opposite experience. I was once hired to an entry-level position where the hiring manager declared, "You will be bored with this job within three months. But it's a foot in the door." And she was right on both counts.

This seems like a pretty foolish decision on the part of the police department, though. Are patrols all they do? Don't they have detectives, tech specialists, and lab geeks? Wouldn't it make sense to grow some of those from within?

I don't know that it is reasonable to expect anything but foolish decision making when the organization excludes smart people on purpose...

Which pretty much sums up the problem in a lot of areas. People tend to hire people who are like them, especially (I believe) if they aren't terribly thoughtful about the advantages of hiring people who don't think like they do or feel threatened by people who are better at something.

lol
Exactly.